Library of Gold

by Alex Archer

  With no other options available to her, Annja manifested her sword and stabbed him through the chest.

  His downward motion pushed the blade clear through him and he ended up staring right into Annja’s face as he breathed his last breath.

  She could hear Vlad and Gianni shouting now, could hear the train moving behind her, and knew, as much as she wanted to, she didn’t have time to rest.

  Annja released the sword and then heaved the dead Russian off of her. It was time to go.

  Chapter 31

  Annja climbed wearily to her feet just in time to see several FSS agents in gray jumpsuits rush down the staircase, pistols in hand. She guessed they weren’t all that happy to see her.

  The feeling was decidedly mutual.

  She didn’t wait around to see what they wanted.

  The train was picking up speed now, the long row of cars moving into the tunnel and farther away from her with every passing second.

  Annja didn’t stop to think, she just turned and ran for the far end of the platform, praying the last car would still be on this side of the tunnel mouth by the time she got there.

  Annja took advantage of the element of surprise as the FSS agents were disturbed by the sight of the subway train leaving the station, and sprinted as fast as her weary body would allow after the train.

  The sound was deafening as the guns echoed in the confined space. Bullets struck the rear of the train, ricocheting off the steel walls, shattering the glass window in the door, even tearing holes in the low fence that protected the short catwalk at the end of the last car. Bullets whipped through the air all around Annja but thankfully she wasn’t hit. She was closing in on the last car now, but knew if she didn’t pick up speed she wasn’t going to make it.

  Stopping the train, with the armed agents right there on the platform, would be suicide for all of them. Vlad and Gianni were leaning out of a window farther along the train, shouting something back at her. She couldn’t tell what they said. It was lost in the roar of the wind as the train sped up.

  The bullets had stopped flying, as the gunmen watched in amazement at what Annja was about to attempt.

  Annja probably would have been pretty amazed herself if she’d had time to think about it.

  Thankfully she didn’t.

  She was less than ten feet from the end of the platform and out of the corner of her eye she could see the last car rapidly approaching.

  Six feet…

  Five…

  As the front of the final car of the train passed by her running form, Annja cut to the right and flung herself out into space.

  It seemed to her as if she hung in the air forever.

  The train was still moving, still pulling away, as her body covered the last five feet in midair and she realized that no matter what happened, this was going to hurt.

  With the blink of an eye, time resumed its normal flow and Annja slammed down onto the small catwalk, the final two feet of the car.

  The force of the impact bounced her back into the air and she felt the g-forces snatch at her, trying to pull her back and away from the moving train.

  She shot out a hand and grabbed the railing even as her body was carried over the edge.

  That left her hanging off the end of the train by one arm, her body twisting to the right, threatening to tear her free from her precarious perch. She was scrambling frantically with her feet, trying to find some purchase and avoid getting them caught in the tracks at the same time.

  Looking back, she could see the FSS agents standing on the platform, openmouthed and staring. As the train disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel, she was struck by the ridiculous urge to wave goodbye.

  Then her hand slipped an inch.

  “No. No, no, no, no!”

  Another half inch.

  The heel of one boot hit the tracks, bouncing her body back upward, and her grip loosened even more.

  She fought against the wind and centrifugal force, trying to turn herself around so that her stomach faced the railing and she could grab it with both hands. But all she managed to do was slide even lower.

  Only the first two knuckles of each finger were still wrapped around the bar and she could feel the aching strain on her wrist as the muscles were pulled tight.

  Another few seconds was all she had… .

  A hand clamped down on her wrist, another grabbed her beneath the armpit and then Vlad was dragging her back over the gate and through the rear door into the subway car proper. They collapsed into a heap in a nearby seat. Her heart was pounding with equal parts fear and relief.

  They stayed there, slumped together like that, for a long moment, both trying to catch their breath. When Annja was finally able to do so, she asked, “Who’s driving this thing?”

  That brought Vlad to his feet and sent him charging between cars back up the length of the train toward the conductor’s compartment.

  Chapter 32

  Annja remained where she was after Vlad left, content to just sit in the seat for a few minutes and try to compose herself. The massive adrenaline surge she’d been experiencing for the past two hours had finally peaked and she knew she was in for a hard dump on the other side as she tried to get her body back to equilibrium. Given the fact that she’d been squeezed, punched, kicked, thrown, shot at and nearly bounced from a moving train—all within the past thirty minutes, it seemed—it was a miracle she was still in one piece. Her body let her know it, too. She didn’t think there was a square inch of her that didn’t hurt.

  The train rattled along on its slow but steady course and gradually the rocking of the subway car put her to sleep.

  She awoke—it might have been minutes later, it might have been hours, she couldn’t tell—to find Gianni standing over her, balancing himself by holding on to the handrails overhead.

  “Vlad needs you up front,” he told her.

  She picked up on the strain in his voice and knew right away it wasn’t good news.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  He told her it was best that she speak directly to Vlad.

  Wearily, Annja got up and went in search of their resident expert on urban exploration.

  As she moved from car to car, she noticed that the train was moving faster than it had been earlier. By the time she entered the conductor’s car at the front of the train, she was convinced that it had sped up since she’d gotten up to move forward.

  Was that even possible?

  She very quickly discovered it was.

  “We have trouble,” Vlad said the minute she stepped into the car.

  “What is it this time?”

  “Train is speeding up. No way to stop it.”

  Annja digested that for a bit.

  “You’ve tried to slow us down?

  “Da.”

  “And it didn’t work?”

  “Nyet.”

  The train lurched beneath their feet. They weren’t going dangerously fast yet, but if they kept up their current rate of increasing speed it certainly wouldn’t be long before they blew past what she considered a comfortable rate of travel.

  She glanced out the front windows, saw the walls rushing by in the lights of the train and suddenly had a near crippling thought.

  What if there was a problem on the tracks?

  The train hadn’t been used in years. That meant the tunnel had most likely been left unused for that long, as well. Just about anything could have gone wrong in that length of time, from jammed track switches to collapsed walls and ceilings. They could be headed directly toward a cave-in right now and wouldn’t have any idea that it was there until they ran straight into it.

  “Can you just shut off the engine? Let it coast to a stop?”

  “I try already. Either train malfunction in past and never fixed or else gunfire did something to controls. I cannot fix.”

  “So what are you telling me? We have to jump?”

  A glance out the window showed them moving along pretty fast at this
point. Jumping from the train at this speed would leave them smeared over the landscape.

  “Nyet. We uncouple engine car.”

  Uncouple the engine car? While they were moving?

  “Ah, okay. How do we do that? Just pull a lever or something?”

  “If only it were that easy,” Gianni said from behind them.

  Annja turned, saw the expression on his face, compared it to the one on Vlad.

  Whatever it is, I’m not going to like this.

  “As far as I can tell from our illustrious leader here,” Gianni said, jerking his thumb in Vlad’s direction, “the tool that is usually used to uncouple the cars from the platforms between them is not on the train.”

  “Can we use something else as a substitute?” she asked.

  “Nyet. Must be special shape to fit.”

  “But you said we need to uncouple the cars. How can we do that if we don’t have this special tool?”

  At least Gianni had the grace to look uncomfortable when he said, “You crawl underneath the car and manually disconnect it.” Emphasis on the you.

  “Ha, ha. Very funny,” she said as the train sped up again on its own. “Now seriously, how do we do this?”

  Neither of them said anything.

  They weren’t kidding.

  Annja didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  “Why me?”

  Vlad pointed at himself first, “Too big. No fit,” and then over at Gianni. “Too nyeuklyuzhii.” He flailed about, bumping into things, to illustrate what he meant.

  Too clumsy.

  A glance out the window confirmed that, no, they weren’t miraculously slowing down all of a sudden.

  If they wanted to get out of this with their hides intact, she was going to have to climb beneath a moving train and uncouple the engine car at high speed.

  Great.

  Just great.

  Five minutes later Annja was stretched out on the small platform that connected the engine to the first of the cars. She stuck her head over the side, looking for the crank Vlad had described to her.

  It wasn’t easy. The ground was whipping by awfully close and every time Annja stretched out to try to look at the undercarriage she worried that her hair would fall forward and get snagged by something that zipped by beneath them. When she held her hair down with the strap of the headlamp she would be using and then bound her hair back with a bit of string they found inside the conductor’s first-aid kit, she began to worry instead about the train passing over large obstacles on the track beneath it and getting struck by one on the way past. Of course there was no way to see such things coming, so…

  “Ten kilometers left,” Vlad muttered.

  Annja whipped her head around to look at him.

  He pointed out the window. “We just pass forty-kilometer mark. Ten kilometers until end of track.”

  Ten kilometers? At the rate they were going that left them…

  “Grab the handle, crank it to the left six turns, push switch, right?”

  “Da. Correct.”

  She checked the knot holding Vlad’s climbing rope around her waist and double-checked that he was braced and ready to support her weight if she slipped. He gave her a thumbs-up and what he must have meant to be a reassuring grin. It was anything but.

  She turned her headlamp on and slipped over the side of the platform before she lost her nerve.

  Chapter 33

  The first thing she noticed was the sound. It had been bad up on the platform, a constant rattling hum that interrupted one’s thoughts and made it hard to focus, but down here it was like a living force, pounding at her.

  If she wasn’t careful, the noise alone could get her killed.

  It was slow going. There was about four feet of space between the underside of the subway car and the surface of the ground. That meant she had to hold her body up close to the underside of the rail car with the strength of her arms while jamming her feet into whatever footholds she could find and clenching her legs to keep them in place. In that fashion she moved, inch by inch, toward the hand crank. She had seen it from above, but now that she was down here everything looked different.

  It was darker, for one thing, and even with the headlamp she had a hard time seeing. The occasional lights running the length of the track would flash through the openings in the wheels, creating a strobe effect that made it even more difficult to pick out what was solid and what was shadow. Twice in the first five steps she reached for what she thought would be a good handhold only to have to pull back when she discovered there was nothing there.

  The rope tied about her waist kept getting caught on things, as well, and she would be forced to hold on with one hand while using the other to try to shake it loose. She thought about calling her sword and cutting it loose, but she knew the sight of the suddenly severed rope would make the other two think she’d been swept off the underside of the train. Heaven only knew what they would do at that point. So she kept at it, inch by inch, until she could see the white painted wheel with the hand bar jutting down from it only a few feet away.

  Sweat was dripping into her eyes, but she just blinked it away and did her best to focus on the task at hand. She repeated the procedure in her head—six turns, counterclockwise, to prime the coupler and then a press of the switch to break away.

  Sounded downright simple, really.

  She should have known better.

  The crank wouldn’t turn.

  She braced herself as best she was able, got a better grip on the crank handle and tried to get it to move.

  Nothing.

  Cursing a blue streak, which she couldn’t hear over the noise of the engines, Annja carefully turned around and jammed her hands and feet into new holds to support her while she used one foot to kick at the crank.

  All she got out of that was a sore foot.

  What she needed was a lever.

  She could use that to pop the crank free and hopefully release the coupler in time.

  Miracle of miracles, she had just the thing.

  Annja summoned her sword. The long blade shimmered in the light of her headlamp. She pulled her arm back, preparing to slide it between the sections of the wheel that formed the main part of the crank, when the train bounced over something on the tracks and Annja lost her grip.

  The sword flashed once and was gone, swept away beneath the train.

  Annja felt herself slip and it was only an instinctual grab for something sturdy that kept her from being swept away right after it.

  She needed a few seconds to catch her breath after that.

  She felt Vlad yanking on the rope, three quick tugs, which was the signal they’d agreed on as a way for Vlad to check in with her and see how she was doing.

  Annja tugged back, twice, short and sharp.

  Even better when I get myself topside again.

  Annja summoned the sword again, knowing it would be there, waiting for her in the otherwhere, just as it was each and every time she reached for it. It didn’t matter if it had been hurled off the deck of a ship, kicked over a cliff, buried beneath an avalanche of snow or dropped under a speeding train, the sword would always return to serve her.

  On the day it didn’t, she suspected she would no longer be worthy of wielding it.

  This time she managed to slide the sword into place through the crank wheel and then put her weight on one side, using the sword blade as added leverage. Slowly, millimeters at a time, the wheel began to turn.

  Using the sword, she moved it through a quarter rotation before testing it and discovering that it was loose enough to move by hand. At that point she let the sword vanish and grabbed the wheel’s handle with her free hand. She cranked it as fast as she dared through six revolutions, then reached out and punched the switch with the palm of her hand.

  There was a sharp crack as the coupler split apart and the two cars were suddenly free of each other.

  Annja didn’t wait around to see what happened after that. The muscles in
her arms and legs were shaking, filled with lactic acid from all the climbing she’d been doing. If she didn’t get back now, she might not be able to get back at all.

  It would be the height of irony to succeed in the mission only to fall under the train a moment after.

  As she crawled to the edge of the car, Vlad and Gianni reached down and hauled her up onto the platform. She rested a moment and then moved through the door into the car proper.

  A glance through the window showed the engine pulling away from them. No longer hampered by all the additional weight at its back, it had begun to pick up more and more speed and before long it would be out of sight somewhere up ahead.

  Vlad began applying the emergency brakes to slow the rest of the train until it finally came to a stop some fifteen minutes later.

  From there, they would have to walk.

  Chapter 34

  As it turned out, the train had come to rest three kilometers from the end of the tunnel. Annja knew this because she’d counted every step they’d taken down the tunnel, needing to know just how close they’d come to being splattered across the landscape.

  Splattered was a good word for it, too. By some miracle the train’s engine had never left the tracks. It had hurtled into the solid rock face at the far end. They had begun finding small pieces of the wreck at least a kilometer earlier and could only stand in stunned silence at what was left.

  Even the larger pieces were difficult to recognize as having once been part of a train.

  Vlad guided them past the flaming wreckage and up onto the station platform nearby, where a whale reached out and tried to kiss Annja.

  Or at least that’s what it seemed like to her. The mosaic covering the back wall of the station platform showed an enormous humpback whale breaching the water. It had been created with such artistry and skill that it gave the viewer the sense that the whale was moving toward them, stretching out of the surface of the wall.

  It was exquisite and Annja felt a pang of sorrow that it was hidden down here in the dark.